Last update:
14-Jan-2025

OBJECTIVE To investigate the phenomenon of moral harassment (mobbing) and the quality of professional life of the medical and nursing staff of the General Hospital of Pyrgos in Greece and the correlation between these two variables.

METHOD The questionnaire was divided into three parts; the first part was related to the collection of demographic data, while the second and third part included the Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terror (LIPT) scale and the Professional Quality Of Life (ProQOL-5) scale, respectively. The research sample consisted of 103/130 (response rate: 79.0%) doctors and nurses and was held from January until March 2023. Data analysis was performed with the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM SPSS), version 25.0.

RESULTS The results showed that 56.4% of the medical and nursing staff have encountered one or more moral harassment behaviors in the last 12 months, while 63.8% of them reported that the incidents of moral harassment were caused by a colleague. Regarding the quality of professional life of medical and nursing staff, participants had a moderate-to-high level of compassion satisfaction, while having a low level of burnout and post-traumatic stress. Also, nursing staff without a position of responsibility and with a permanent or auxiliary job were more likely to have experienced moral harassment in the last 12 months, while the medical and nursing staff who had experienced moral harassment in the last 12 months had a significantly lower level of compassion satisfaction and a significantly higher level of burnout and post-traumatic stress.

CONCLUSIONS The phenomenon of moral harassment exists in Greek hospitals and must be addressed by hospital administrations, through the planning and adoption of good practices to deal with the problem and the formation of a good professional life quality.

Key words: General Hospital of Ilia – Nursing Unit of Pyrgos, Medical and nursing staff, Mobbing, Professional life quality.